illegal content

venturebeat.com

July 9-10, 2013 San Francisco, CA Tickets On Sale Now A national group of state attorneys general is taking Google to task over what they says amounts to aiding drug dealers online. Mississippi state Attorney General Jim Hood, who chairs the National Association of Attorneys General, says the search...

betabeat.com

(Photo: CNN) Last night, the now-notorious Reddit troll Violentacrez, whom Gawker recently exposed as a 49-year-old Texas-based programmer named Michael Brutsch, appeared on Anderson Cooper 360 for God knows what reason. In the painfully awkward two-part interview, during which Mr. Cooper thankfully gave us a commercial break to collect ourselves...

gigaom.com

A protest against Russian proposals to block websites deemed illegal has brought out the web’s big beast, after the bill was passed by the lower house of the country’s parliament. The Duma passed bill 89417-6, in which the government proposed creating a blacklist of websites containing child porn, drug-related and extremist material...

www.techdirt.com

For a while now, we've been following the ridiculous story of Richard O'Dwyer, the student in the UK who the US is trying to extradite to face criminal charges, all because he created a website where people linked to streaming TV shows (some legal, some not). At no time did...

thenextweb.com

In less than a month since the Russian authorities created the blacklist of websites distributing illegal content, Google’s services have been put there and blocked several times. Since November 1, Russian media watchdog Roskomnadzor can order local hosting providers and ISPs to block access to any website by putting it...

www.computerworld.com

A verdict against Megaupload in the U.S. would mean other cloud storage providers can be held criminally liable for illegal content stored by customers on their networks, an attorney representing the shuttered file-sharing site said on Tuesday....

www.theverge.com

A British government report on the roots of religious radicalization and terrorism has called for ISPs to self-regulate potentially illegal content that incites terrorism, suggesting that contrary to the results of research published in November last year, the internet "features in most, if not all, of the routes of...

techcrunch.com

Contrary to several reports, Wikipedia’s Founder Jimmy Wales is not relinquishing his editorial control of Wikipedia and its related projects. On Friday, Fox News reported that “a shakeup is underway at the top levels of Wikipedia…Wales is no longer able to delete files, remove administrators, assign projects or edit...

betabeat.com

Screengrab, Copyrightinformation.org TorrentFreak reports that the Copyright Alert System, which some big Internet service providers were planning to implement Wednesday, is on hold. The system has been delayed due to adverse conditions following Superstorm Sandy, which threw a hugely destructive wrench into the works for many utilities and ISPs. The...

venturebeat.com

Indonesia’s Communications and Information Minister has declared that anyone tweeting illegal content, such as blasphemy, pornography, and threats, could spend up to 12 years in prison. Indonesia has a strained history with free speech issues and open media, so laws that would punish Twitter users harshly for their words...

www.theverge.com

In an interview with CNET, RapidShare's general counsel Daniel Raimer discussed the service's strict self-policing policies that he says go above and beyond what is required by international copyright law. The site hopes to avoid the fate of sites like Megaupload — which is currently embroiled in a legal...

gigaom.com

Unless you spend a lot of time on Reddit, the discussion-forum community that more or less took over after Digg sank beneath the waves, you may have missed the latest storm of controversy over content posted on the site’s various “sub-Reddits” or topic pages. Although Reddit has played host to...

gigaom.com

The ongoing battle between internet providers and rights owners is taking a surprising turn, with the news that Russia is considering whether it can make ISPs liable for the copyright infringements of their customers. Reports in the local media say that the country’s Ministry of Internal Affairs is looking to...

www.techdirt.com

We've noted that both Russia and China recently pushed for even more internet censorship, and both did so while claiming that it was really to "protect the children." Of course, lots of other countries are following suit. For example, Argentina is now considering a bill that appears to created a...

arstechnica.com

Russian-language sites are protesting a bill submitted to the lower house of Russian parliament this week. The bill would create a national registry of blacklisted sites that contained child pornography, extremist ideas, and suicide- or drug-related content. Many of the bill's opponents say Duma Bill 89417-6 (titled "On protection of children...

torrentfreak.com

With e-readers becoming more popular year after year, book piracy is seen as a growing problem for the publishing industry. To deal with this threat the French Publishers Association (SNE) announced several countermeasures this week. One of their key initiatives is ProtectionLivres.com, a new anti-piracy portal that will allow publishers...

arstechnica.com

In the United States, most online services are spared the burden of filtering their users' content. As long as they promptly take down files on request and follow other requirements laid out in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, online service providers don't need to proactively monitor the files they...

thenextweb.com

After a high-profile apology in the face of widespread media criticism, Apple is being accused of kowtowing to the Chinese government after it barred local access to an app that includes content that authorities deemed to be ‘illegal’ in the country. The Financial Times reports [paywalled] that bookstore app ‘jingdian shucheng’...

venturebeat.com

Image from Flickr user Uncle Catherine Influential New York investor Fred Wilson was one of the earliest and loudest opponents of the anti-piracy bill SOPA. He worried that it would threaten sites he considered legitimate, like Reddit, or Tumblr, which is backed by his firm Union Square Ventures. But as...

www.techdirt.com

It really was just a few months ago, that we noted an interesting footnote in a legal ruling, in which a judge speculated briefly on the question of whether or not porn can be covered by copyright. There have been a few courts that have suggested, in fact, that pornography...

betabeat.com

(Photo: Wikipedia) It’s apparently easier than ever to make like Neely O’Hara and hoard red pills, blue pills, all the pills, just by clicking a mouse. Thanks again, Internet. The National Association of Attorneys General say a plethora of prescription drugs and their counterfeit counterparts are available online, and it’s...

venturebeat.com

A bill created by all four parties in the Russian parliament would censor the internet in Russia, creating a unified blacklist to block access to websites containing “banned pornography, drug ads and promoting suicide or extremist ideas.” The bill, which is really a series of amendments to existing laws, was...

torrentfreak.com

Earlier this week research from the Columbia University affiliated American Assembly found that U.S. file-sharers buy 30% more music than their non-sharing music owning peers. Two days later the Dutch Institution for Information Law and CentERdata have published a related report which goes even further. The survey finds that more...

thenextweb.com

A lot has been happening in the world of media this week, and as usual we’ve taken the liberty of looking at some of the key, notable events this week and thrown them together in an easy-to-digest compendium here. Without further ado, here’s the week’s media news in review…. Video:...

www.extremetech.com

China has long been a home to internet censorship, but it has been relatively lax until recently. Internet users have been able to easily and cheaply thwart the restrictions for years, but a number of concerning events show a trend toward more substantial censorship in the People’s Republic of China...

www.techdirt.com

This year saw two huge victories for digital activism: against SOPA in the US, and against ACTA in the EU. The big question is now: what will be the next moves of those behind SOPA and ACTA as they seek to regain the initiative? For SOPA, we've had a clue...

torrentfreak.com

Despite its “rogue site” status and various other warnings, when MegaUpload went down last week it still came as a shock. But what came next was unprecedented, a dramatic reaction in cyberlocker land that took out vast libraries of digital content and capacity. The perception of the established ground rules...

www.guardian.co.uk

Google's second Big Tent event is in its second year - and this year has panels on pornography, copyright and more10.14am: Kirsty Hughes of Index On Censorship: danger of affecting freedom of speech (Platell said she was in favour of preserving freedom of speech).Hughes points out that we're talking here...

www.slashgear.com

With MegaUpload facing irretrievable data loss later this week and rival services locking down their file sharing options, attention has turned to well-used but clandestine rival RapidShare AG and whether it will occupy the cloud storage vacuum or be next in line for the FBI’s attentions. Worlds apart from the showy Kim Dotcom,...